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Undoing a Spell (Without Magic)

By Maya Lau April 25, 2013 6:08 pmApril 25, 2013 6:08 pm

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As someone who uses The Times’s stylebook frequently enough to have installed it in the upper-right-hand search window in Firefox — it’s my second search-engine option, after Google — I’ve been interested in the ways that words are continually evolving at The Times. A couple of days ago, editors at the paper updated the stylebook’s guidelines on the use of “illegal immigrant”; a little more than a week before that, Margaret Sullivan, The Times’s public editor, argued that more attention should be paid to the way the paper uses the terms “torture” and “targeted killings.”

Another term (albeit less loaded) that generates some debate is “Voodoo,” which I started thinking about after coming across an interesting article on the long-form-journalism site Narratively about three New Yorkers who practice that faith. According to its members, “Vodou” is the correct spelling, which is how it’s rendered in Haitian Creole. One follower is Val Jeanty, 38, who is frustrated by the popular assumption that Vodou is all about “evil hexes.” She simply sees it as “a way of life.”

“It’s about being connected to nature,” Jeanty explains. Her grandmother communicated with the plants and could identify exactly which one was poisonous or which was meant for healing — which leaf cured a tummy ache and which could put you to sleep. Jeanty herself is a strong believer in animism, the concept that natural objects, phenomena and the universe itself possess souls.

The article, which is accompanied by photographs showing — but not sensationalizing — scenes of Vodou ceremonies in New York, presents Vodou as something to be taken seriously, not dismissed as a Hollywood stereotype of the creepy occult. It’s a point of view The Times appears to be embracing. While the stylebook prefers “Voodoo,” the more familiar usage, it allows both spellings, noting: “Some followers and scholars prefer other spellings, such as ‘Vodou,’ in part to distinguish from the use of ‘voodoo’ in a disparaging sense. … Be aware that use of ‘voodoo’ to mean nonsense or superstition may give offense, and consider alternatives.”

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…